When Nascar Mattered

It was decades ago, but HOT ROD used to cover NASCAR. You graybeard readers will remember it well: There were annual race features on the Daytona 500 and Riverside, tech articles on the latest trickery from Junior Johnson and Smokey Yunick, and monthly roundy-round columns by Steve Kelley and Joe Whitlock. It was great racing with awesome cars, and HOT ROD was all over it. So what happened? Why doesn’t HOT ROD do NASCAR anymore?

2/25

We can start here: Somewhere along the line, stock cars lost their stockness. It’s impossible to identify a single point at which NASCAR lost its connection to real production machinery; it was more of a process. Maybe the verisimilitude first started to slip away in 1966, when NASCAR allowed the Ford teams to run Galaxie front frame stubs under their unit-body Fairlanes and Comets. Maybe it was 1969, when scratch-built control arms and dry-sump oil systems were permitted. Or 1972, when fabricated framerails appeared. But eventually, the moment came when everyone looked up and noticed that NASCAR stockers no longer bore any real resemblance to Detroit production vehicles—or relevance to hot rodders, either. The death of real stock cars had come by a thousand cuts. And by then, HOT ROD and NASCAR had gone their separate ways.

That’s not how it was in the early ’60s, when the factory high-performance scene was taking off. Then, rodders looked to NASCAR—and reached for their copies of HOT ROD—to get the scoop on the latest go-fast machinery from Detroit. Rodders could see that the stuff racing at Daytona and Darlington was identical to, or at least bore a striking resemblance to, the stuff for sale in the showrooms. They felt a connection. Take some time to explore these fabulous old photos from the magazine’s archives. See for yourself just how amazingly stock and real the cars were—from their production floorpans to their roll-up windows. You’ll feel the same connection.

The NASCAR race cars of 2012 offer no such connection. They bear no resemblance to the cars in your world and share no components. None, not even the lug nuts. They barely look like cars at all—more like formless, soulless blobs. The four makes of cars that compete in NASCAR resemble each other far more than they do the production vehicles they supposedly represent, and in fact they all fit the same body template. The headlamps and taillamps are decals. The engines may say Chevrolet, Dodge, Ford, and Toyota on the valve covers, but you can’t buy them anywhere, not over the counter, not in any current production vehicles. NASCAR’s current hardware lacks relevance to anything, anywhere—except within NASCAR.

You can blame NASCAR for allowing stock car racing to evolve into this weird, sad state, but to be fair, professional racing series around the world are in the same condition. This is the same fate suffered by GT and sports racing in Europe, NHRA Pro Stock, and even by IndyCars and F1. Endless supplies of money and technology have driven pro motorsports out of the realm of the traditional car enthusiast and into a strange parallel universe that isn’t really about cars. Today, big-time racing is about driver personalities and sponsors and TV ratings and attendance figures and money, money, money. The cars are props.

Give NASCAR credit for managing this brave new world of motorsports better than anyone, taking auto racing to levels of popularity never seen in the United States. The racing may seem calculated, even contrived, but no one can say it doesn’t fill the seats. When, after three hours and 490 miles of racing, 40 cars all arrived on the same lap, in the same pack, fighting for the win, that was no accident. It took considerable work and skill by NASCAR to manufacture that result. And when half the field got caught up in the same 200-mph wreck and 20 drivers walked away without injury, that wasn’t luck, either. That also required tremendous work on the part of NASCAR.

“The primary reason the cars are what they are is pretty obvious,” says John Darby, who serves as both managing director of competition and Sprint Cup director at NASCAR. “It’s the level of safety we require, the engineered structure around the driver that forms his cocoon. It more than anything defines the character of the car. We can’t race the cars you drive at 70 mph on the interstate. Our guys are running 200 mph most every Sunday. Our goals are to provide parity for the competitors and excitement for the fans, but one thing we can’t ever compromise on is safety.” And if they cut the speeds by half to accommodate cars that were closer to stock, would anyone watch at all?

15/25Petty Engineering patriarch Lee Petty looks over the 426ci wedge in one of the team's electric-blue '63 Plymouths. Note all the production trim pieces as well as the damaged front bumper--no doubt the result of some work with the chrome horn.

With so little relevance to real production automobiles, why do the automakers burn so much money and effort in NASCAR? A ten-year-old can see that these stock cars aren’t remotely stock anymore, yet reportedly the automakers each spend tens of millions annually in the series. Where’s the payoff? “First, it’s car racing, and we’re in the car business,” says Jamie Allison, director of Ford Racing. “Next, NASCAR is the iconic form of American motorsports. It predominates. According to our quarterly research, 40 percent of the new-car buyers in America identify themselves as race fans, and 84 percent say they watch NASCAR.”

Very well, then. When you put it that way—as the director of Ford Racing just did—the manufacturers can’t afford not to be in NASCAR. It’s the big show. Relatively speaking, every other form of racing is the loose change in the cushions. And money talks, so don’t look for NASCAR to change in any major way any time soon. Resistance is futile. Here’s our best recommendation to all you former NASCAR fans out there: Get yourself a great big stack of old HOT ROD magazines.

One Bite at a Time

The folks at Ford are fully on the NASCAR bandwagon, as noted. That said, the status quo could still use some work in their view. “Our research was showing some disengagement among fans due to the cars looking all the same,” says Ford Racing Director Jamie Allison. (Hmm—interesting word, disengagement.) “We’ve learned that fans currently identify first with the driver, second with the team, and third with the manufacturer. Their lowest affinity is with us. Obviously, that’s something we need to improve.” According to the NASCAR rumor mill, Allison was among those who pushed for discussions among the four manufacturers and NASCAR—discussions that generated more liberal body rules for 2013 to allow greater brand identity.

19/25The lamps are still decals, and the doors still aren't doors, but the proportions and silhouette of the next-generation NASCAR racer are much closer to those of the production '13 Fusion, the Ford people say.

Allison’s point men for the 2013 car included NASCAR Operations Manager Andy Slankard and Sprint Cup Program Manager Patrick DiMarco, while the boots on the ground included Ford Racing’s chief aerodynamicist, Bernie Marcus, and a key player from Ford Design, Senior Designer Garen Nicoghosian. “To our knowledge this is the first time the Ford Design Center was directly involved in the NASCAR body,” Slankard says. “The designers are the people who give Ford vehicles their look, and they used all their powers to build the same identity into the NASCAR Ford Fusion. The project proceeded just like with any Ford vehicle, with 40 percent foam models, clay models, the works."

“NASCAR has allowed the four OEs to hand-deliver some common surfaces and areas shared by all,” DiMarco says. “These include the A-pillar, roof, B-pillar, backlight, and so on—the car’s basic silhouette. The rest of the real estate we are free to use to establish our brand identity. Proportions are another important area. The current Cup chassis is too short in the front overhang and too long in the rear overhang compared with the production car. With this new car, we are much more in line with the production car’s true proportions.”

Ford’s 2013 entry will be branded as a Fusion, while Dodge will continue with the Charger and Toyota with the Camry. As of press time, Chevrolet has not announced its intentions. The eye-opening element of the 2013 car is the amount of freedom NASCAR has handed back to the manufacturers, which, while incremental, is unprecedented in recent years. “We have a great deal of confidence now in the wind tunnel and CFD, and we have a much better understanding than we used to about height, width, and length, and how they affect the performance of the vehicle,” says John Darby, NASCAR director of competition. “We can give a lot more real estate back to the manufacturers and come to a reasonable balance. We know we can do this.”

However, these changes are entirely cosmetic. Underneath the revised sheetmetal, a Nextel Cup racer remains nothing like a production car. It’s just going to look somewhat more like a production car. Still, Allison is pleased with the progress. “Would we like to see more movement toward a stock-type vehicle? Of course,” he says. “We want more relevance, more context, as time goes by. But given the times, I’m very satisfied with where we are for 2013. We’ll take it one bite at a time.”

NASCAR Goes EFI

It was 2003, and John Fernandez, then the engineering director at Dodge Motorsports, realized his NASCAR engine program had a problem. Sensing a basic carburetion issue, he looked toward Chrysler engineering for some carburetor experts to sort it out—only to discover that the company no longer had any. “They were all gone. Retired,” he noted. “We hadn’t introduced a new vehicle with a carburetor in like 15 years. With electronic fuel injection, we do our tuning on the computer. We had to call in our retirees to bail us out.”

Here we are in 2012, and NASCAR has finally joined the mid-’80s with its own proprietary EFI system. It’s not terribly advanced or sophisticated, but then, like everything else in NASCAR, it wasn’t designed to dazzle the pundits or advance the state of the art. It was engineered to meet NASCAR’s own needs as it sees them, which include simplicity, reliability, and complete transparency.

McLaren Electronic Systems, which already has years under its belt supplying Formula 1, teamed up with Texas chip manufacturer Freescale to provide the control units. While the individual teams own, maintain, and program their own ECUs, NASCAR retains control over the boxes, including the locking/unlocking functions. So the teams have full tuning and mapping capabilities while NASCAR has the capability to stalk their every move, preventing potential monkey business—like oh, say, traction control or fuel-mixture trimming on the fly.

Along with speed-density fuel mapping, the ECU also provides built-in ignition capabilities, eliminating the distributor. Closed-loop fuel control is provided via a pair of Bosch wide-band oxygen sensors, one in each header collector. Fuel pressure is in the 75-psi range, with three manufacturers opting to use traditional pressure/return plumbing, while one (we can’t say which) is running a returnless system.

The intake manifold and throttle-body configurations are virtually identical to the previous single-plane, single Holley setup, which eases the transition for engine suppliers and allows NASCAR to continue its restrictor-plate system, which is used to limit speeds on the big tracks at Daytona and Talladega. One odd wrinkle is the high location of the eight injectors—just below the throttle-body. What’s that about? “The high location introduces the fuel into the intake port well upstream from the intake valve,” explains Jim Covey, engine technical manager at GM Racing. “This prevents any one manufacturer from gaining an advantage in efficiency of the fuel delivery downstream.” Once again, NASCAR seems to have its hand on everything.